HP XP P9500 Storage - Manual (Page 72)

Smart Tiers
About tiered storage
In a tiered storage environment, storage tiers can be configured to accommodate different categories
of data. A tier is a group of storage media (pool volumes) in a THP pool. Tiers are determined by
a single storage media type. A storage tier can be one type of data drive, including SSD, SAS,
SATA, or external volumes. Media of high-speed response performance make up the upper tiers.
Media of low-speed response or cost become the lower tiers. Up to a maximum of three tiers can
coexist in each pool.
Categories of data may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements,
frequency of use, and other considerations. Using different types of storage tiers helps reduce
storage costs and improve performance.
Because assigning data to particular media may be an ongoing and complex activity, Smart Tiers
software automatically manages the process based on user-defined policies.
As an example of tiered storage, tier 1 data (such as mission-critical, or recently accessed) might
be stored on expensive and high-quality media such as double-parity RAIDs (redundant arrays of
independent disks). Tier 2 data (such as financial or seldom-used data) might be stored on less
expensive storage media. Supported drive types are SAS 15K, SAS 10K, SAS 7.2K, SATA-W/V,
SATA-E, and SSD.
Tier monitoring and data relocation
Smart Tiers uses storage tiers to manage data storage. It classifies the specified data drives grouped
in the pool into tiers (storage hierarchy). Up to three tiers to a pool can be defined depending on
the processing capacity of the data drives. Tiering allocates more frequently accessed data to the
upper tier and less frequently accessed data, stored for a long period of time, to the lower tier.
Smart Pool
With Smart Tiers, you can enable the Smart Pool option for an existing pool. The default is to allow
tier relocation for each THP V-VOL. Only the THP V-VOLs for which tier relocation is enabled are
subject to calculation of the tier range value, and tier relocation will be performed on them.
72 Configuring thin provisioning